Tech Tuesday: Text Data Source
Monday, April 18, 2011Welcome to the start of Tech Tuesday posts on our blog! Each Tuesday I will be adding a new article to this collection that can be used in your own projects and implementations. I’ll try to keep them brief and to the point as the idea behind them is to be more technically focused to balance out Martin’s dominance of the blog up to this point.
One question that we commonly receive in support is whether or not SmartConnect can read in data from text files that may not have a header or files that may use a delimiter other than a comma. We can actually use SmartConnect to configure all the connection details to your needed text file.
When you are setting up the data source you should choose ODBC as the connection type and then select the text driver from the connection string lookup button.
One question that we commonly receive in support is whether or not SmartConnect can read in data from text files that may not have a header or files that may use a delimiter other than a comma. We can actually use SmartConnect to configure all the connection details to your needed text file.
When you are setting up the data source you should choose ODBC as the connection type and then select the text driver from the connection string lookup button.
In the ODBC Text driver setup window you will want to uncheck the Use Current Directory option and then hit the Select Directory button and choose the folder that contains the text file you want to use as the data source.
Next, hit the Options button to expand the setup window and then hit the Define Format button. From this window you can choose your file, determine whether it has headers or not with the option box, and also choose the delimiter. If you choose the Custom Delimited option you can enter the pipe character in the field below it.
Once you have selected your file and determined the header and delimiter options, you can hit the Guess button at the top right to have the driver determine what columns are in your source file and their data types. Once you have everything configured properly from these windows, you can close out of them and continue with your map setup as normal.
Tech Tuesday… Chris, this is a great idea. Looking forward to future posts!